Teaching Sociology: The Precariousness of Academic Freedom

Threats to academic freedom are not new. Scholars who wrote about academic freedom decades ago were hinting at some of the same issues that we face today. However, as time passes, the threats seem to grow stronger (largely as a consequence of the increasing corporatization of higher education). While some threats are overt, and tend to flare up at particular points in time, others are of a more covert nature that slowly erode the foundations of academic freedom. This address focuses on a number of these threats (neoliberalism, contingency, political intolerance, etc.) and their relationship to sociology